15-05-2025 - Eleonora speech
It has been 586 days since Israel started its latest genocidal campaign in Gaza. It’s been 74 days since Israel has decided to completely starve 2.1 million people, half of them children.
It has been too long, and the lack of intervention by national or international authorities is jarring. We are few here, but the numbers of those that support the cause of the Palestinians are continuously growing. That is thanks to you, and everyone who has done something, anything, to bring attention to matter.
Every hour we manage to strip from this genocidal campaign is an hour worth saving. Every child we manage to save is worth months of activism. It is easy to be discouraged by the masses that choose to look away, who know, but do not act. Because of this our responsibility becomes even greater. It is an obligation, that we remain hopeful and steadfast. We cannot afford to lose hope.
I turn to the following words of the intellectual Antonio Gramsci, who kept writing and fighting against fascism in the decade he spent behind bars.
“I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help but being a citizen and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, they are not life. That is why I hate the indifferent.
Indifference is the deadweight of history. Indifference operates with great power on history. Indifference operates passively, but it operates. It is fate, which cannot be counted on.
That what is happening, the evil that weighs upon all, happens because the human masses abdicate to their own will; it allows laws to be promulgated that only a revolt could nullify, and leaves men that only a mutiny will be able to overthrow to achieve power.”
People who let everything happen do not realize it, but they are the most powerful force in history. I look around here and I see people who instead have decided to act, to go against the apathy of the current, who have decided to take on their responsibility in history, to be alive.
Deciding to act to defend humanity is an act of life, whereas passively ignoring injustice is the real culture of death. Do not be discouraged for being a minority in taking action, this has historically always been the case for whomever wanted to change the world, for better or worse.
The world has changed and it will change, and you are working to tip the scale. It is only by taking responsibility to act, that liberation can be achieved.